ImpressCMS Member Lounge

Curious about Github Codespaces

Hi, I'm curious if some of you have experience with Github Codespaces. I tried some similar services some years ago but they were very clunky, more or less a remote desktop via your browser to a virtualised pc.

The user experience wasn't great, and the features were severely limited. I don't know if all this has improved enough for me to look into using Github Codespaces as an alternative to a local IDE.

For some codebases, my laptop (a nice but slightly out-of-date Surface Book 2 with only 8GB of RAM) is starting to get limited by it's RAM, but adding RAM is no option, I'd have to replace the entire laptop. For the price of a new laptop, I could work many hours on Github Codespaces

Curious if you have experience with this.

Topic


Re: How does your community shop?

I saw that a few months ago and thought it was a nice touch. It's true that the Dutch grocery stores have been coming to the Belgian market these last few years, and to be competitive in our already saturated market (and counter the difficulty in finding staff to man the checkout counters) they invested heavily in self-scan and self-checkout. 

Personally (but I'm an IT guy, so I'm not really joe public) I prefer doing the self-scan (the kids love it) and the self-checkout, but I can understand that for some people, they prefer a more personal touch during their shopping.

The last 5 years we've seen that the big grocery chains with their big stores on the edge of the towns have been setting up a network of in-town small grocery shops. The independant shops can no longer compete with the buying power of the large concerns, so they let themselves be integrated in those networks. The idea is that more and more people living in towns don't have a car anymore and go around by bike. Singles don't go shopping for the next 2 weeks, they go multiple times a week to buy what they need at that time. The smaller grocery stores respond to that need.

Topic


How does your community shop?

My regular work is to provide service and support for retailers and restaurants for their point of sale systems. We also offer 'self checkout', also known as 'fastlanes'. I saw this and it brings back an era I grew up in, and even closer to what my parents and grandparents experienced. Being part Dutch, I connect with this a lot.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/a-checkout-line-where-slower-is-better-supermarket-jumbo/

https://www.unilad.com/news/slow-checkout-lane-netherlands-supermarket-205944-20230109.amp.html

I'm curious what you're shopping experiences are like.



Re: Now on Mastodon

I also created a Fediverse (that's what it's called it seems ) account for ImpressCMS itself : @impresscms@phpc.social



Re: Merry Christmas!

We're a bit light on tradition in our family, compared to you We've moved across the country (150 km, which is almost the other side of the country here in Belgium) from our family, so it takes some organising to keep everybody happy, and make sure we have some time for ourselves as well. Schools have Christmas holidays for 2 weeks each year, so we have to organise that period for the kids as well, in combination with our limited number of vacation days.

Normally, we go to my parents for Christmas Eve, and there we open all the gifts under the christmas tree we have for each other. You won't be surprised when I say that the vast majority is for the girls We're flexible in the timing.

Because we arrived around noon on christmas eve this year, we opened the presents then, taking into account we would leave the country 2 days later. That way, the girls had as much time to play with their newly received toys as possible.

These last few years, my parents-in-law have chosen to spend the Christmas and new year period in their appartment in La Caleta, on the gorgeous sunny island of Tenerife, and they invite us to come over for a holiday and see the fireworks. These last few years we were lucky that christmas came at the very beginning of the holidays, so we could spend almost 2 weeks there. I dare almost say this has instantly become a new family tradition. And believe it or not : the first day after we get here, we go to get a haircut, every time

Because we are always guests somewhere else, we try to suggest food that is easy to prepare, and try to help as much in the organising and the preparation the day itself. This year, on Christmas day, the journey was more important than the destination :  grandpa making pizza from scratch with his granddaughters. Priceless to see the amount of fun they had, and the result was very tasty as well.

Climate wise, it's been since my teens that I can remember a white christmas. The last time we had really multiple days of snow was more than 10 years ago. This year, it even looks like we will break the record of the highest temperature ever in Belgium on the last day of the year : 16° Celcius - a nice spring day.

The first saturday of the year, the Mayor of Mechelen invites all his citizens to come together on the market plaza in the center of town, and have free drinks and free snacks to celebrate the new year. You can imagine it's a fun way to greet people also living in Mechelen you see only a few times a year, and it's very popular.



Re: Merry Christmas!

Christmas, for us, comes at the darkest and coldest time of year, and we try to bring light and warmth through a variety of activities. A lot of our traditions are family traditions from several families and generations. While we live in the US, we trace our heritage to Europe and Scandinavia, melding a lot of old cultures with new creativity.

For us, Christmas starts on with Christmas Eve on December 24 (after dark) and extends to January 6 (Epiphany). We do decorate (for light and warmth) - I usually get a fresh cut evergreen and bring it in a couple of weeks before Christmas Eve. It stays up until January 6.

We definitely gather as many as we can - travel conditions and health being the main separators. Attending Christmas Eve church service is also part of my tradition. This year, weather kept us at home.

Food - just lots of it. The items that get the most attention are the cookies (Kekse, koekjes, småkakor, biscuits). There are some recipes that are difficult to reproduce the way we remember them. Even though they're German (springerle), they're not that common among all people of German ancestry. My great-aunt's recipe is very descriptive, just not a lot of details. "Start early in the morning ... Before noon ... After dinner ...". 1 of the ingredients is a bit difficult to find in the US (baking ammonia), so I don't attempt them often.

The children get gifts, the adults exchange gifts - either by drawing a name beforehand, or with a random drawing the day we gather. We also send cards and letters to friends and family.

Music is also an integral part of Christmas - music, hymns, carols, anthems, oratorios, and cantatas specifically for this season. I've got more playlists, music CDs, and albums for Christmas than any other genre.

Part of my heritage is Dutch - the surnames are de Bruyn and Kops, as well as the combined de Bruyn Kops. Plus, there's some Bohemian/Czech (Smetana) in my blood. I would love to hear your traditions for this time of year!



Re: Merry Christmas!

Thank you, David - Merry Christmas to you, too!

We had some dangerous weather (even for us in Minnesota) leading up to Christmas - snow, lots of it (8"/20cm in the last storm). Cold lots of it (down to -12F/-24C). Then - wind, lots of it (30-40mph/48 - 64kph). We still managed to gather over the weekend and celebrate for the holiday. And we have a few gatherings to reschedule.

It's warming up over the next few days and the view from our window is beautiful

 


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Merry Christmas!

I would like to wish everyone a very merry Christmas!

Europe is profiting from quite warm temperatures for the time of year. It's 10 degrees centigrade, which is 20 more than a week ago. But I get the news that the holiday period in the USA is not starting easily with snow storms and arctic temperatures foreseen in the near future. And I don't know how things are going in Asia on that account.

I hope everyone gets to have lots of quality time with loved ones, because that is what this period stands for, no matter your religion or beliefs.

And after that: countdown to the new year, which will be full of surprises as always.

How do you plan to spend this period? I'm curious into what other cultures and countries do around the turn of the year.



Now on Mastodon

I'm not a big twitter user, but it has been impossible also for me not to get exposed to the drama coming with the acquisition by the world's richest man.

As many of the people on twitter I follow are from the PHP scene, and quite a few of them are moving to Mastodon and the fediverse (like the metaverse, but the fediverse does exist), I decided to take the plunge and create an account on phpc.social.

You can find me now on @davidjanssens@phpc.social



Anyone on Discord?

Many open source communities are available on Discord, with IRC losing more and more users. So I figured I give it a shot. If anyone is on discord and wants to contact me, let me know via PM and I'll share my ID.



Re: Should we offer a way to disable FLoC

Looks like Google was taken aback by the many and strong negative comments they received. Introduction is now delayed until 2023 (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-delays-floc-rollout-until-2023/). And in internet time, 2 years is an eternity.

It is a fact that the internet has become a privacy nightmare (and the ever-present cookie-banners in Europe aren't really helping, just annoying the users), but a proposal by the largest ad vendor will always be regarded with a dose of suspicion. I'm curious to see what will come next.



Re: Should we offer a way to disable FLoC

A privacy concern, for sure. With GDPR and other privacy laws, I am curious how Google intends to maintain compliance.



Should we offer a way to disable FLoC

Google will phase out third-party cookies in their Chrome browser, which is used by the majority of web users. Google is and remains a advertisement company, so they offered to put in place an alternative that they consider better for privacy, but would still give advertisers information about the current users, they call it FLoC. I won't go too much into detail here, but instead of having your profile stored on the servers of Ad providers, you create your own profile locally, and that profile can be queries with a specific API. So potentially (depending on the implementation) the browsers harvests user data from the sites you visit, independently from the services that might be used on those websites.

Backlash has started now on the internet, with several browsers saying they will not support FLoC, but also Wordpress has entered in the mix, stating that they consider FLoC a security risk, and that Wordpress will contain code that will tell the browser the do not want FLoC data : Proposal: Treat FLoC like a security concern – Make WordPress Core

ImpressCMS aims to be as secure as possible, do you think this would be an option we should have somewhere in the ACP?



Ideas for Swag requested

We have a program running on HackerOne, and one of the recurring questions is if the hackers there can be compensated for their efforts. As an open source project without a company financially backing us, I don't think offering payment is an option. I was thinking more about t-shirts or other funny/nice gadgets with ImpressCMS branding.

The hackers at hackerone have done a great job, and certainly in the beginning stage, I would like to thank them all with a little something.

The problem I have encountered is that the costs could become astronomically high if we would handle the sending around the world by ourselves. I made a quick check : sending a t-shirt (worth 8-10€) to India for example, would cost me 56€.

Talking with @Mekdrop we discussed drop-shipping services, because those services would take the sending of the items on their account (which would be less of a headache to handle for us as well). However, not all of those services allow for your own things to be printed or created.

I would like to hear experience with drop-shipping services, and also other options we migh not have thought about.



Happy Thanksgiving, 2020!

This year has been challenging, to say the least. People all around the world are having their predictable lives become very unpredictable. Things change every day. Health care systems and workers are being stretched thin to provide care to a growing number of people. Families are being isolated and separated.

In the past year, we've released 1.4.0 and 1.4.1, along with 1.3.12 and 3 more test releases of 2.0.

Thank you all! Stay safe!



Re: impresscms info domain - keep or let go?

Luckily, the sale of the .org domain was halted by ICANN, but I get your point. With all the .sale and .store and other types of TLDs (there's even a .brussels - go figure), it becomes impossible to follow.

As a matter of fact, I was hoping on someone adopting it, but there wasn't much response on the forum. I'll make some more noice on social media and the upcoming newsletter.



Re: impresscms info domain - keep or let go?

With all the new TLDs in the past few years, I don’t know how much of an impact the TLD has over the actual domain and content on that domain. We’ve also been faced with the shift in .org to another registrar and losing its original intent - non-commercial, non-profit organizations. 
 

Maintaining multiple sites does come with some additional overhead. It can also lend some link authority - if the domain has a history and it’s content is deemed helpful. 
 

If you aren’t it sure you want to hold on to it, rather than let it go, perhaps someone else would like to adopt?



Re: impresscms info domain - keep or let go?

that might be a good reason to renew the domain, keeping it out of harms way. The .info TLD is not that good when it comes to placement on search engines, so the impact wouldn't be that big.

I wouldn't split off the info parts for several reasons:

  • the info TLD is low on the rankings, so information on that TLD will be less easy to find
  • It makes it necessary to manage multiple sites again, a time consumer I'd like to avoid

But I could keep the domain for some future angle



Re: impresscms info domain - keep or let go?

Sometimes I hold domains just so someone else doesn't grab them and turn it into something that would negatively impact the brand.

Would moving all our information (like the wiki) to the .info site make sense, or be a benefit?



impresscms info domain - keep or let go?

Some years ago, I registered the impresscms.info domain, at the time with grand ideas of running a separate site with all kinds of information around ImpressCMS. My availabilities were not what they should have been, so I haven't been able to work out a concept for a site that would be beneficial for ImpressCMS, without cannibalising this site here. 

The domain name is almost at expiration, and I'm not sure if it makes sense to renew it. If anyone has an idea and time to setup a ImpressCMS supporting site on that domain, I'm more than willing to make the domain available for that at no cost and cover the first year of renewal (and hosting, if needed).

Let me know, deadline : july 1st, 2020.




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